Newsletter

Posted December 28, 2013 08:30 pm

Letter: Common Core, stop it now

After reading a recent letter regarding Americans for Prosperity’s discussion of Common Core state standards, I’d like to point out the issue isn’t where the meeting was conducted, but rather its content. Perhaps the letter’s author didn’t attend the meeting. I did.

Common Core, like similar programs before it, follows the same formula of applying a “one-size-fits-all” solution to education. Despite these laudable, yet failed efforts of the past, the National Assessment of Education Progress has found no significant improvement in student achievement.

The U.S. Department of Education encouraged states to sign on to Common Core in 2009 — before the standards were written — by attaching their participation to federal grants. States were eager to get waivers from No Child Left Behind on condition they adopt Common Core. That’s what we call out of the frying pan and into the fire.

Readers might not yet agree Common Core itself is bad for education. They might not care about personal stories of lament.

But if nothing else, we ought to care enough to seriously contemplate the gravity of giving up local control. Would you simply hand over your personal medical decisions to an unaccountable government? I hope not. So why would you want to give up your child’s privacy and local control to the developers of Common Core?

The state Board of Education’s decision to keep more control of testing by pulling out of the Smarter Balanced consortium was a move in the right direction, but it shouldn’t end there.

If we care about what and how young people are taught, we must act by letting our legislators, governor and state Board of Education know that heading toward a centralized education system is not government for the people and by the people. Let’s get our voice back. Let’s stop the Common Core.